Between a Boy and a Girl
by true-elven
Summary: John/Cameron. *Continued from an original "one-shot." Begins immediately after "The Turk," when John confronts Cameron about Jordan's suicide and ends up confronting his own confused emotions about his beautiful, too-human protector.
1. Chapter 1

**Setting: **Just after "The Turk"

**Spoilers: **None

"Just a Boy"

Sleep often proved elusive for John Connor. In his more reflective moments, he thought perhaps his insomnia stemmed from never having one safe place to call home, his own bed in his own bedroom, the same branches from the same tall oak tree scraping menacingly against the same window and casting the same creepy, claw-like shadows across the same carpet his whole life. Some kids, John knew, lived in the same house their entire lives, even came back to that same house after they were grown-up and married with kids of their own. Having lived in so many houses and apartments in his sixteen years that he could hardly recall them all, John sometimes wondered if his inability to drop quickly off into blissful dreams derived from never having had such safety and security himself.

But reflective moments were rare for John. He didn't believe in spending too much time inside his own head, or too much time trying to figure out what made him (or anyone else) tick. So most of the time, he chalked his sleepless nights up to more obvious, less psychological reasons.

Like the fact that he was constantly being hunted, either by the FBI or programmed-to-kill robots from the post-apocalyptic future. (Sometimes, on a particularly bad week, both.)

Or that he drank way, way too much coffee for a sixteen-year-old.

Or that his mother routinely woke up from a nightmare in which (a) her son had been killed by said robots, (b) the world had been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, (c) she had died and left said son and the world unprotected, or (d) all of the above. No matter how many times he heard his mother's strangled waking cry, John doubted he would ever be able to simply roll over and go back to sleep afterwards.

More recently, though, the interruption to his REM cycle could have had something to do with a certain Terminator who insisted on prowling the house at night. All night. Every night.

Cameron made very little noise, John had to admit. In fact, lying in his back bedroom with the door half-shut and the blankets pulled over his head, he had to strain to hear the soft slap-pat of her bare feet on the plank floor. Only rarely did she step on the creaking board in front of the stove, and then, in spite of her metal skeleton, she proved so light of foot that the sound wouldn't have registered with anyone who wasn't listening for it.

John, however, was listening.

He was listening because he couldn't not listen, knowing she was out there, awake, restless, vigilant. He felt like a disgusting, twisted pervert for picturing her slender feet moving endlessly over the wood and tile floors, yet each time he closed his eyes, there she was – first a foot, then a leanly-muscled leg, then a taut stomach, then –

Then his eyes would pop open, and he would order himself, for the umpteenth time, to _stop fantasizing about the damn robot._

With fantasies firmly out-of-bounds, John would next find his wayward, sleep-deprived brain insisting on formulating questions about Cameron. She had seemed so _human_ when he had first met her; looking back on it now, he realized he had thought she was a bit quirky, rather endearingly odd, in the charming way only strikingly gorgeous women can pull off without just seeming, well, weird. Now that he knew she was a Terminator, though, John couldn't view her strangely forthright mannerisms – her tendency, like a young child, to speak the truth, regardless of how uncomfortable it might be to hear – in the same forgiving light. He looked at her and saw a machine playing human. The same as all the rest of them, every other Terminator he'd ever encountered.

Even the one who had saved his life before Cameron, who had helped him rescue his mother from a psych ward and had tried to destroy SkyNet. Who had been the closest thing to a father John had ever really known. Even he had been thoroughly not-human.

Except Cameron was…

Different.

She had said it herself, not long after they had met, when the year was still 1999. She had intimated that she was in some ways human, or at least not totally a machine. And every time John's mind circled back to that memory, the way she had looked so earnestly into his face as she had reached into his bag of chips, he would start to wonder exactly which parts of her were machine and which parts were human. And then he would start to think about how soft her hair felt when it accidentally brushed his face in the car or how kissable her lips looked when she said his name or –

Which, of course, brought him right back to: _Stop fantasizing about the damn robot!_

The night after witnessing one of his new classmates leap to her death, John had plenty of reasons for not being able to sleep. For starters, he was furious with Cameron for preventing him from coming to the girl, Jordan's, aide; he could have saved her, John knew it in his guts, if he had only been able to talk to her. Because, really, who wanted to die at sixteen? Hadn't he occasionally flirted with the idea of stepping out into on-coming traffic when the going got tough? Everybody thought like that sometimes. Everybody got all messed up inside, saw things backwards and upside down, wanted out of whatever madness was encircling them bad enough to think death might be an option. But those thoughts were fleeting, momentary – and if they got stuck, well, that was when somebody else was supposed to step in, pull the desperate person back from the edge, remind her that life had a way of going on and working itself out.

What was the good of being some big-deal hero in the future if he wasn't allowed to do even the simplest, smallest acts of kindness and decency in the here-and-now?

All of the things he wanted to say to Cameron flooded John's mind again as his alarm clock ticked toward one in the morning. Down the hall, if he squeezed his eyes shut tight and focused only on his sense of hearing, he could just make out the robot's footsteps tracing back and forth, back and forth through the kitchen and living room. Next door, his mother's breathing was, for once, slow and even. Now was his chance – if he wanted to take it, if he wanted to march out there and explain to that _thing, _that _machine, _why human life was valuable, even one human life, certainly worth the tiny little risk he would have been taking to run up that fire escape and offer some help…

Thinking back on the terrible, stomach-dropping crunch of bone and skin meeting pavement, John sprang out of bed, unable to contain his anger for another second. Quickly but quietly (his mother was not a very sound sleeper, a fact which had kept them out of jail and alive on several occasions), John pulled a Counting Crows tee-shirt on over his blue flannel pajama pants and stalked out into the kitchen.

Where he found Cameron just turning from the window above the sink.

Moonlight spilled over her fair skin, catching the sun-kissed highlights in her dark hair. Since Sarah had given her The Talk about wearing clothes, Cameron was clad in black yoga pants that skimmed her ankles and an oversized white tee-shirt – one of _his _shirts, John realized with a jolt – which left the curves underneath to John's fully-developed imagination.

_Stop. Fantasizing. About. The. ROBOT._

Seeing him there, frozen in the doorway, Cameron paused mid-step and cocked her head at him, in that adorably inquisitive way that had so taken John when he'd first met her. "Is something wrong?" she asked.

"Shh! Keep your voice down." John cut a glance over his shoulder toward his mother's bedroom. The door was closed; he listened for a moment, waiting to see if Sarah would appear, but her door stayed shut.

"Is something wrong?" Cameron repeated, this time in a stage whisper that almost – almost, not quite – made John smile.

He was trying to recapture the self-righteous fury that had propelled him out of bed and into the hallway, without much success. Savior of humankind he might be, but for the moment, John was still a teenage boy, and hating himself for being prey to the unaffected wiles of a beautiful girl.

Robot. Whatever. She looked like a girl, so couldn't he be pardoned for getting confused about the fact that she wasn't human? Didn't popular philosophy insist that perception was reality?

"No, nothing's wrong. What would be wrong?"

Proud of himself for managing to sound disdainful of her protectiveness, John forced himself to walk right past Cameron like her beauty didn't phase him in the slightest. An adept liar (by necessity, not by choice), he bought himself time to recover his typical cavalier façade by pretending to be on the hunt for a midnight snack. "I got hungry's all. You want something?"

"No. I keep thinking about that girl. The one who died."

John, hand hovering inside the cabinet about to grasp a jar of peanut butter, froze. He couldn't name all of the emotions wiring through him: amazement, at Cameron's audacity in bringing up the one subject she should have been loathe to discuss with him; rage, at the apparent unconcern in her voice as she calmly referred to such a terrible tragedy; compassion, for the innocent honesty that prompted what he recognized as genuine puzzelement in her tone.

For a machine programmed to be alert for any danger, Cameron proved, as usual, oblivious to human emotion. She didn't appear to notice the effect her words were having on John as she continued, "Humans always talk about survival. The instinct for survival. Fighting for life. But you kill yourselves. Why?"

"Are you serious?" Rage won out amongst John's warring emotions. By a force of will, he managed not to slam the cabinet door before spinning around to face Cameron, his jaw set. She gazed evenly back at him. "You're seriously asking _me_ why people commit suicide when you stopped me from helping that girl?"

"You couldn't get involved. You would have drawn attention to yourself. You can't draw attention to yourself."

"So what?" John demanded, moving a step closer to Cameron, practically shaking with anger. In his mind's eye, he kept replaying that horrible, slow-motion moment when Jordan's body had toppled over the edge of the roof – not flailing, not fighting, simply falling.

"So we get noticed, and we run again. Big deal. We're always running. I can't remember a time when I wasn't running, from something. At least this would have been something worth fighting for."

Cameron's eyes flashed, a brief yet unmistakable spark of that humanness John could not deny he saw within her, despite the unavoidable fact that she was a machine. "You have something worth fighting for," she began.

Having heard time and time again how vital his survival was to the continuation of humanity, John cut Cameron off with a bitter laugh. "Right, I know. In the future. Well, you know what I think, Cameron? I think there's stuff worth fighting for right now. And sometimes," he concluded, stopping as he came toe-to-toe with this unfathomable creature, whom he alternately found infuriating and captivating, half-hoping she would strike him so he could pound out his frustration on her near-invincible frame, "I don't give a damn about this 'future' you and my mom are so obsessed with. Sometimes, I'd just like to spend one day – no, I take that back, just _one second _– in the present."

A weighty silence fell over the room. The ticking of the living room clock sounded loud in John's ears; he half-expected his mother's voice to sound over his shoulder, demanding to know what all the commotion was about. The house remained quiet, though, the clock and his breathing the only sounds.

The world, the future, the senseless death of a young woman, his anger, it all began to melt, to narrow, to blur into a pair of dark eyes gazing unblinkingly into his, a sweep of dark hair tumbling around a lovely female face…

"You're angry with me."

Cameron's simple observation shattered the silence but not the spell holding John inches from her. "Yes," he heard himself say hoarsely. "I'm angry with you."

"Because of the girl who jumped. Because you wanted to help her." Without waiting for an answer, Cameron continued, "My mission is to protect you, John. That's why I'm here. To save you. Even if you don't want to be saved."

_You, John. That's why I'm here._

_You, John._

"You're wearing my shirt."

It was a stupid, nonsensical thing to say, yet the words slipped out without John even realizing he meant to say them.

"I found it in the laundry. It smells like you."

John's knees went positively weak when Cameron's eyes flicked ever-so-quickly to his mouth before returning immediately to his. Trying to smooth the tremor out of his voice, he managed, "That's, uh, that's some Terminator thing, right? Like, smelling me, it makes you better able to track me, or whatever?"

Cameron shook her head. Her hair bounced prettily against her shoulders when she did so, and John decided if he stayed this close to her much longer, he was going to pass out. "No. I just like that it smells like you. Are you angry with me for taking your shirt without asking, too?"

"No. I'm not – it's – you can have it. The shirt." John was telling himself to back up, ordering himself to in fact.

He could hear his mother's voice in his head: _She is a MACHINE, John. She is not a girl. She's certainly not your girlfriend. So, for the last time –_

_Stop fantasizing about the damn robot!_

_And go to bed!_

Only, John's feet seemed disconnected from his brain. His entire body seemed disconnected from his brain, actually, as if some vital circuit had been blown and he was operating completely on desire and instinct, outside the realm of rational thought and logic. Because rationally, John knew he couldn't lift his hand, brush a stray lock of hair off Cameron's cheek, and tuck it behind her ear, allowing him to then deftly cup her chin in his hand; logically, he knew he couldn't dip his own mouth toward hers, watching her stare back at him, wondering if she knew what a kiss was, if she would hit him, or scream, or press harder into his embrace –

Their mouths met, tentatively, and the universe didn't explode. Dimly, wherever in his fogged brain thought was still occurring, John realized he had half-expected the natural order of the world itself to rebel against the concept of a human being kissing a machine. The stars stayed up in the heavens, though, the earth did not spew forth lava, time itself did not stop.

Well, not literally, anyway. From where John was standing, with his fingers tangled in Cameron's hair and her body molding itself to his and her lips warm and sweet and soft and pliant under the pressure of his, fireworks lit up the night sky, the earth shook to its foundation, and everything in the world ceased to exist except for the girl in his arms.

Who was not a girl, but who was kissing like she knew how to be one. Who was wearing his shirt because it smelled like him, which was, in John's estimation, a very girl thing to do. Who was responsible for saving his life, yes, and thereby protecting the future of humankind, yes, yet who also seemed quite interested in who he was, as a boy. As a person.

The kiss gained fervor after a few tentative seconds. Cameron's palms splayed on John's chest, clutching the front of his shirt and urging him closer; John, in thoroughly unfamiliar territory here (his kissing experience was limited to a few painful and hastily-forgotten encounters with rather trashy girls desperate for attention, even from the new oddball geek), gave himself over to the heat rising from deep within him. Her tongue brushed across his lips, drawing a small, smothered moan from him, and then their mouths were open, and the kiss was building in passion, stealing John's breath.

Down the hall, a floorboard creaked.

John leapt away from Cameron with a speed that would have done a Terminator proud – a speed only a son about to be caught red-handed doing the last thing he would ever want his mother to see him doing (kissing a girl, and not just any girl but a non-human one at that) could manage. Cameron ducked her head to one side, her fingers resting lightly against her slightly-swollen lips, a flush coloring her high cheekbones.

They looked, John was sure, guilty as sin.

He groped blindly for the peanut butter in the cabinet, glad to have his back to the hallway and a moment to compose himself before his mother entered the room.

"What's going on out here?" Sarah called. "John? What are you doing up?"

_Deep breaths. It's like being shot at: Focus, and you live._

Hitching his best "angry teenager" glower into place, John turned slowly and held the peanut butter jar aloft for his mother to see. "Snack," he replied. He crossed his fingers behind his back that his preternaturally-perceptive mother would chalk his clipped tones up to continued fury over being prevented from saving Jordan's life.

Sarah's eyes bored into her son before switching to Cameron, whose normal, placid expression was back in place, John noted with some relief (and perhaps a little disappointment that she could recover from their kiss so swiftly). "And you?"

"I don't sleep."

"So I've heard." Sarah arched a sardonic eyebrow at her son's protector. John winced at his mother's obvious disdain for Cameron; he wished she could look past the machine, see what was underneath…

_What is underneath? Just metal, or something more?_

That way, John knew, lay madness, so he ordered himself, once and for all, to give it up. Because whether he liked it or not, his mother was nearer to the mark than he was: Cameron was not a girl. She was a machine.

"Finish your snack and get back to bed, young man," Sarah commanded. She was already turning back toward her room. "You have school in the morning, and I don't want to hear any excuses about you being too tired to get up."

"Since when have I ever not wanted to go to school?" John muttered, stashing the peanut butter back in the cabinet. "It's the only normal part of my whole goddamn abnormal life."

Cameron started forward as John made to beat a hasty retreat from the room. He reluctantly slowed; the desire of minutes earlier had left a strong undercurrent of something dark and nameless between them, something John – who, after all, was not accustomed to spending much time in his own head, and wasn't eager to start – found himself unwilling to confront just then. He wanted the sanctuary of his room, the softness of his sheets, the possibility of sleep to clear his mind.

"Look." He cut short whatever Cameron had been poised to say, though he could hardly look her in the eye as he spoke. "That was…whatever that was, it was just for then, for that one time. You get it? You understand that this, _that_, can't happen?"

Automatically, Cameron nodded. "You're human. I'm not."

"Exactly. So…We'll just forget about it then, 'kay?"

She studied him quizzically. "How do we do that?"

Both annoyed and charmed by her innocence, John answered impatiently, "By never talking about it. We'll just pretend it didn't happen. Everything will go on like before. You're a Terminator, and I'm, well, I'm me. Got it?"

"Got it." Cameron nodded like a dutiful soldier. "It never happened. Everything is just like before."

The falsity of her words resonated deep within John. His own guilt, a sense of shame for desiring something that wasn't even human, and his fear that if he remained a moment longer, he might seize her by the shoulders and kiss her again (and something in her somber eyes told him she would not fight against that), chased him down the hall, where he closed his door with a firm click and dove into his bed, like a child afraid of monsters and hiding under the sheets.

To John's surprise, in spite of his hammering heart and racing mind, he started to drop off to sleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow. He could still taste Cameron on his lips, still feel her body pressing into his, yet despite all the tumultuous emotions their kiss had raised within him, for the first time in a very, very long time, John felt strangely peaceful inside.

It was a kiss. One kiss. With a machine made to look just like a beautiful woman – a machine designed to pass as human. A machine with what could only be called a "personality," and the root of that word, after all, was "person." Whatever else Cameron was, she was unique, and special, and good. Whether she was those things because she had been programmed to be or because she was, in some essential way, different from any other Terminator John had so far encountered, he suddenly realized, that it didn't matter. That he didn't have anything to feel guilty about.

If perception was reality, then for one blissful, passion-hazy moment, Cameron had really and truly been a girl, a lovely, amazing girl. And for that moment, he, John, had finally been what he had always wished he could be.

Someone with the same bed to sleep in, night after night, in the same house, with the same roof over his head and the same school to go to the next day and the same name to give when he was asked. Someone without the weight of the world on his shoulders. Someone who wasn't destined to save millions of lives, to fight in a war he could hardly conceive of.

For an instant, John had seen himself as Cameron seemed to see him, and he thought, as the sweet waters of sleep closed over his head, that he understood why it affected him so. Because in that moment, he hadn't been John Connor, savior, kissing the machine sent back through time to save his life. To him, Cameron had just been a girl; to her, John had just been a boy.

Just an ordinary boy.


	2. Chapter 2

**Setting: **Just after "Dungeons and Dragons"

**Spoilers: **None

_A/N: Thanks for all of the wonderful reviews – you persuaded me to give this another go, but I don't know if I'll continue or not. Probably depends on what turns the show takes. But I like the idea of Cameron's increasing human-ness, and of how John would react to that, so I hope you enjoy this chapter and find time to review!_

"Only Human"

John had always thought finding out more about his family – and by "family," he meant his father, Kyle Reese – would give him more of a sense of belonging in the world. The same way he had always wondered if sleeping in the same bed in the same house his entire life would have given him a much-needed sense of security, John had always privately believed that had his mother been a bit more forthcoming about the few brief hours she had spent with his ill-fated father, John might have felt more like a real person, birthed of two living, breathing parents, instead of a messiah who had been dropped from the skies.

Sometimes, he thought it was easier for his mother to think of him that way – like he had been immaculately conceived. Whenever Sarah spoke of Kyle Reese, a tightness around her lips told John plainly that the grief of losing the first man she had ever loved was almost more than his incredibly strong mother could bear.

Because he loved her, John had never pressed the issue. He had looked for small openings in conversations to slip in a casual, nonchalant question; he had kept his ears pricked for the tiniest scraps of information dropped here and there, by chance or accident, usually when his mother was lecturing him on the importance of his destiny. But he could not bring himself to demand answers outright. He couldn't stand bringing more pain into his mother's life.

Only now, with his uncle, his father's brother and his own flesh and blood, sleeping in the next room, Kyle Reese had become a very real, very unavoidable fact of their lives.

Down the hall, Sarah was tossing and turning in a fitful sleep. John could hear her mattress springs squeak each time she rolled over, and he wondered what nightmares were haunting her this time – her son's death, her lover's death, the end of the world, or something else entirely. Maybe something to do with Charlie Dixon.

Standing at the kitchen window as they took leave of one another in the yard, John hadn't missed the tenderness with which Charlie had embraced his mother. They still loved one another, that much was obvious.

John wasn't sure how he felt about that. On the one hand, he, too, loved Charlie. He trusted him, enough to bring him into their crazy world (which was more than John could say about most people in his life), and he admitted readily to himself that he missed the father-son camaraderie Charlie had introduced into his life. On the other hand, though, John couldn't stop himself from feeling, no matter how nonsensical the emotion was, that his mother was betraying his father by having such longings for another man while Kyle Reese's brother lay half-dead on their kitchen table, sent back through time, just like John's father, to save them and the world.

Sixteen years. More than that, considering that they had jumped across time, but in Sarah's memory, it had been sixteen years since she had seen or touched Kyle Reese. How long could one person be expected to go on grieving? How lonely could one person be expected to make her life in honor of a memory?

Hadn't she sacrificed enough for the future Kyle Reese had come back to protect? Wasn't she entitled to some happiness?

John rolled over in bed, tugging the pillow down tighter over his ears to shut out the sounds of his mother's distress. Theoretically, he was going to save the world in a few years' time, lead the human resistance against the machines so expertly that an entire race would have him to thank for their survival. Hours ago he had pumped his own blood into his uncle to save his life. But he couldn't do the simplest thing in the world, the only thing a son ever really wanted to do.

He couldn't make his mother happy.

In fact, he was risking making her a great deal more unhappy than she already was, because another thing John couldn't do was stop thinking about his kiss with Cameron.

"Stop fantasizing about the damn robot" had become an unending mantra, running through John's brain like a CD stuck on repeat. Cameron seemed to have taken his order to forget the entire episode to heart. Her treatment of him vacillated between aloof respect and ardent friendship, just as it had for their entire acquaintance. She might have been a tad more reserved, a bit more secretive. Or that could have just been John's imagination. Because the truth was, he didn't want Cameron to have forgotten about their steamy embrace. Especially since the memory of her lips on his filled the majority of his waking hours – and, like tonight, often chased away sleep when he wanted those waking hours to end.

Finally abandoning the possibility of a restful night, John kicked back the covers and, quiet as a mouse, slipped into an old pair of sweats and a much-battered pair of running shoes. He was under strict orders from his mother (and Charlie) to rest; he had donated a good portion of his own blood to save Derek, and he needed to let his body recover. Logically, John understood this. But his warring emotions over his mother, his father, Derek, Charlie and Cameron all conspired to make him feel that he might lose his mind if he didn't burn off some of his restless energy.

So, silently lifting the sash of his bedroom window, John slipped out into the muggy southern California darkness and jogged off down the sidewalk at a slow, easy pace.

John had ceased to fear robot assassins years ago. His mother was constantly looking over her shoulder, but John, while he appreciated the reality of the danger, had realized that for the sake of his sanity he couldn't always duck around a corner whenever he thought he heard footsteps behind him. John tried his best not only to appear but also to live as a normal person – the sort of teenage boy who could go for a late-night run without fearing anything other than a mugger in the shadows of his run-down neighborhood. Although it might not have been the most prudent approach for his personal safety, for John, it was necessary to convince himself that he was the same as everyone else.

For several blocks, the exertion worked its magic, clearing John's troubled mind and leaving him with the pleasantly washed-out feeling he associated with good, hard cries (always conducted a safe distance from his mother's sharp ears) and strenuous exercise. He fell into a sort of running meditation, his mind separating from conscious thought, broken only when he suddenly became aware that his legs were slowing down, his knees turning rubbery beneath him.

_You idiot – you just drained a couple of pints of blood out of yourself, and you go for a six-mile jog in the middle of the night on no sleep and no food?_

John sank onto a wooden bench along the sidewalk, shaking and shivering despite the balmy night air. He didn't recognize the neighborhood he had entered, but the well-manicured lawns, locked two-car garages and darkened two-storey windows reassured him that at least he wasn't going to pass out in a place where he was likely to be stabbed or shot. Certainly if he could drag himself onto someone's porch, one of these clean-living middle class families would take pity on him and call his mother. Of course, that meant getting to his feet and walking, which at the moment, John realized with an encroaching sense of panic, he couldn't do.

His heart was alternately racing and weakly fluttering. A wave of sickness swept over him, doubling him over; he retched dryly, his stomach too empty to bring anything up. His tongue felt swollen, his lips burnt. Walking was most definitely out of the question, at least for now. John stretched himself out on the bench, thinking that if he could just rest, he would soon feel better…

He thought he was delusional when Cameron's beautiful face appeared above him, her dark hair cascading toward him, her brow furrowed with concern.

"You're sick," she declared, kneeling beside him. She placed a cool palm on his clammy forehead. John gulped for air. "You shouldn't have been running. Your blood sugar is too low."

"No shit," John managed thinly. "Can you get me home?"

"I could carry you, but that would attract attention." Cameron was unwrapping a Kit Kat bar she had produced from the pocket of her jeans. She pressed it, still warm from the heat of her skin, into John's hand and guided it toward his mouth. "Eat this, and you'll feel better."

The gooey chocolate nearly choked John, whose mouth was painfully parched. Still, not unaccustomed to physical discomfort, he dutifully chewed and swallowed while Cameron crossed the street to a small park he hadn't noticed and filled her cupped hands with water from a fountain. John struggled into a sitting position so he could sip the cool liquid from her palms. Ill as he was, he couldn't help but notice that her fingers, when his lips accidentally brushed across them, tasted salty.

_Stop. Fantasizing. About. The. ROBOT._

In a few minutes, with his blood sugar normalizing and his thirst sated, John felt well enough to stand, though his quavering knees forced him to lean heavily on Cameron. "We could steal a car," he suggested hopefully, dreading the six-mile trek back to their house.

"Not a good idea. The authorities would be called – "

"I was kidding," John grated out, irritated by Cameron's relentless focus on her mission. Now that his brain was fully functioning again, he also found himself rather miffed about her presence on the nighttime street at all – lucky for him she was there, obviously, but that didn't mean he enjoyed being followed.

"Did my mom tell you to spy on me?" he challenged. Cameron's arm was wrapped securely around his waist, his arm draped loosely over her shoulders; to anyone driving by, they probably looked like a young couple making their way home from a night of hard partying. "Is that why you're out here?"

Cameron shook her head. Her hair brushed John's cheek as she did so, sending tingles down his spine. "I was on the swing-set when you climbed out your window. I followed you."

"Why? Oh, right, because you're all about keeping me safe," John answered his own question sarcastically. "What were you doing out on the swing in the middle of the night anyway?"

"Your mother told me not to pace the house because of the injured man. She said he needed to rest. So I went outside." Cameron stopped abruptly, her grip tightening on John's waist. "You should sit down before we go farther. Your heart rate is elevated again."

Grateful for the respite – he was feeling rather light-headed – John plunked himself down on a high concrete curb separating the sidewalk from a Little League baseball field. Cameron stood in front of him, her eyes moving across the dark field behind them, then over the empty lawns lit dimly by the street lamps. In spite of his annoyance with her for dogging his every move, John couldn't help noticing how pretty Cameron looked in the orange-yellow glow, her skin so fair it was almost translucent, her dark eyes luminous behind thick lashes.

"You didn't leave me."

Cameron's non sequitir baffled John. "What're you talking about?"

"That's why I came after you. I thought it might not be safe for you to be out here alone in case Cromartie found you."

"I get that part," John broke in impatiently. "But what do you mean, I didn't leave you? Leave you where?"

His heart gave a painful little thump of excitement. Did she mean in the future? Was she going to tell him more about who he was in that post-apocalyptic world, about how she had come to be selected for this oh-so-important mission, about why she seemed so much more human than any machine should have been able to?

For one wild second, John had the fleeting hope that Cameron would declare that in the future, the two of them were madly, passionately in love. That he had reprogrammed her and made her into something so human that everyone, all of his friends and admirers and followers, cheered on their romance. That he had saved her from being a mindless killing machine, given her a purpose, helped her become human –

John slammed a mental lid on those ridiculous imaginings. One thing he knew, one thing he had learned from the cradle, was that life was no fairytale. Cameron was a machine, built to destroy human beings with the utmost speed and efficiency. Her loyalty to him had nothing to do with "feelings"; it had everything to do with a chip in her head, like the one she had torn out of that Terminator who had nearly blown his uncle in half, which John's future self had soldered and rewired in order to give her a new mission.

Circuits and wires, metal and bolts, that's all she was. Living tissue over a metal exoskeleton. A combat chasse, not a ribcage; a motherboard, not a brain. Cameron was not a girl, and if she thought of him as a boy, well, that was only an aspect of her programming, intended to help her seem human when she first made contact with him under the guise of a high school beauty.

Except now, Cameron was turning those not-human eyes on him with a quiet intensity that drove all thought from John's mind, just as her gaze had on a not-so-long ago night when he had ended up taking her in his arms. "When we were rescuing Derek Reese," Cameron patiently explained. She moved forward one small step, so that she now stood directly in front of where John was seated, their toes touching. "When I was fighting with the other Terminator. I saw you. Charlie Dixon and your mother tried to make you get in the car, but you wouldn't. You wouldn't leave me."

John's mouth was dry again, but this time, he knew the cause was not his blood sugar. He recalled that awful moment vividly: Rationally, he had known Cameron could hold her own against the other machine, yet seeing her beaten and crawling had awoken something primal in him, an instinct to protect her, to save her.

_Because you're falling in love with the damn robot, like an idiot._

The voice in John's mind sounded eerily like his mother's. He thought of Sarah's pained expression whenever she spoke of his father; he thought of the nightmare her life had become because she had allowed herself to love someone she should never have loved, a hero come back through time, a man who had not, when he had known her, technically even been born yet but who had managed to impregnate her with a son. Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor had defied all laws of nature by loving one another, and look what had come of it.

Madness.

John stood, telling himself that he could do this, that he could look directly into Cameron's lovely eyes and lie to her and to himself. That he could end this, whatever was happening between them, with a word.

Perhaps Cameron recognized his intention, for she never let him get that word out.

Sliding her fingers into the scruffy hair along the nape of John's neck, Cameron wordlessly guided his mouth down to hers. John didn't fight; for a split-second, he was too shocked at how expertly she had taken the initiative – a very human and very woman-like (not even girl-like, _woman-_like) thing to do – to turn away. And then?

Well, then he was swimming in her. The soft lips urging his to press harder, the sweet-tasting tongue delving into his mouth, the slender leg curling itself around his, all of these things became the extent of John's world, blotting out his best intentions to end the madness before it could begin.

His hands, seemingly of their own volition, settled on Cameron's waist and drew her closer. This time, the kiss was long and lingering, smoldering instead of explosive; there was urgency, yes, but also a mutual desire to take their time, to melt into one another slowly, mouths and bodies fused under the cloudless starry sky. John felt himself sinking back onto the curb, drawing Cameron down onto his lap, wondering only vaguely how far he should let this go while knowing, in his heart of hearts, that it would, if not tonight then some night, go all the way, regardless of consequences.

Cameron tipped his head back gently and kissed away from John's mouth, down his jaw and across his neck, her tongue skimming his earlobe and making him shiver. His skin was on fire for the touch of hers; his fingers crept under the hem of her tee-shirt, moving along her belly, inching upward –

The sharp, piercing wail of a police siren jolted John back to reality. Cameron leapt to her feet, eyes scanning for the source of the sound. For one awful second, John thought they had been spotted by a late-night patrolman. Probably some jerk of a cop, too, who would demand to know what two kids were doing out so late, alone, and who would insist on driving them home, waking John's mother, creating all kinds of havoc and confusion in the Reese/Connor household.

Luckily, however, the sirens were coming from the freeway a few miles east. John and Cameron exchanged a quick, guilty grin as they realized their escape. For a moment, John was unsettled to find that, unlike their other kiss, this one had not left him feeling ashamed or guilty. In fact, he felt light as a feather.

Which could have had something to do with his blood loss, of course, but seemed to him more connected to the amazing creature now sliding her arm back around his waist and steering him toward home.

They walked in contented silence for quite some distance. As the little house they called home for now came into view, however, Cameron asked, almost shyly, "Do we forget about this, too?"

John hesitated. He could say yes; he could still end this, still prevent whatever heartache might come of it, still spare his mother the horrified pain of ever learning that her son had fallen head-over-heels for the one thing she hated most in the universe – a machine. If he told her to, Cameron would "forget" this latest passionate embrace as well. She would accept his order. She was programmed to do so.

Or would she? A small flicker of doubt darted across John's mind. She had behaved so boldly minutes earlier, kissing him like that at just the moment when he had been about to shut down any possibility of future kisses. Had she known that was what he meant to do? Had she stopped him, deliberately, or had she simply reacted to…what? The memory of their earlier kiss, her mechanical interpretation of what humans did in such situations based on that previous encounter?

No, that made no sense. Cameron had acted on desire. And desire was a feeling, not a computer program. Desire was human. Desire couldn't be programmed.

Fear rose up in John. If Cameron couldn't be programmed, she couldn't be controlled. A Terminator that couldn't be controlled – a machine that couldn't be programmed – that was what would trigger Judgment Day.

_But she's on our side. She's good. She cares for me. _

_And anyway, could I destroy her, just on the off chance that she might be a threat to us someday?_

Such thoughts were too painful for John to entertain. He felt a lot more sympathy for his mother's plight all at once. He could understand, with a clarity never before possible, why she would simply not want to think about how her relationship with Kyle Reese had ended, why she would rather remember nothing besides their brief happiness. The end was too awful. Easier to remember the ecstasy of infatuation, the intoxication of first love, than to recall the horror of loss.

They continued on to the house as John mulled over his answer. Cameron led him over to his bedroom window, still unlocked and partially open; inside, all was dark and silent. It seemed Sarah had finally fallen into more peaceful dreams, or at least hadn't woken enough to go check on her son, because if she had noted his absence in the middle of the night John was certain the house would have been abuzz with activity.

One hand on the window sill to steady himself, John dropped a light kiss into Cameron's hair and smiled, perhaps a little shakily, at her. "No, we don't have to forget," he answered, speaking over his doubts and fears. Cameron's liquid-brown eyes, lit up with the diamond-sparkle of a thousand midnight stars, made it simpler to shove any unhappy thoughts aside. "But I think we'd best keep this a secret, or my mom'll be taking the first chance she gets to turn you into scrap metal."

Cameron nodded solemnly. "A secret. I can keep a secret."

Whatever unease that comment might have stirred in John was chased away by Cameron's tender good-night kiss.


End file.
